Miller called out, “Heil Hitler!” after being escorted into a cop car on Sunday afternoon, and the investigating authorities are treating the shootings as a hate crime. None of the victims were Jewish, but the local police chief said of Miller, “We believe that his motivation was to attack a Jewish facility.” He was charged with murder on Tuesday.

So why didn’t anyone stop him?

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The answer is that you can’t arrest someone until you know he is plotting to commit a crime. (The other way lies thought police and Minority Report.) Despite all the evidence that Miller hated Jews, there’s no evidence, so far, that Miller was conspiring with other people to commit last weekend’s shootings. Still, there was plenty of evidence that he might have wanted to, which is why it’s surprising that, despite Miller’s history, the government wasn’t keeping tabs on him. “The fact of the matter is that little attention is paid by federal law enforcement to white supremacism as a trigger for domestic terrorism,” Heidi Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project for the Southern Poverty Law Center, told me over the phone. The SPLC had Miller on its tracking list for hate groups and extremists, but it’s a nonprofit organization with no law enforcement power. “I was a little shocked when someone told me local law enforcement had never even heard of him.”

Under the name “Rounder,” Miller posted more than 12,000 times on the supremacist Vanguard News Network. He also gave the news site money, Beirich says, and helped with distribution. “He was not just an Internet warrior,” she told me. “He was out on the streets for them.” Update, April 16, 2014: Since my original reporting for this piece, the Southern Poverty Law Center has posted audio of Beirich talking to Miller.

This built on a lifetime of similar activism. In the early 1980s, when Miller started his Carolina Knights group in North Carolina, the Southern Poverty Law Center brought a civil lawsuit against him and the group for harassing and pointing guns at black people, and also white people who were friends with black people. The suit resulted in a 1985 consent decree that blocked Miller and the groups from operating a “paramilitary organization” and from harassing, intimidating, threatening, or harming “any black person or white person who associates with black persons.” But according to the SPLC, Miller kept at it, changing his group’s name to the White Patriot Party. He was found guilty of violating the consent order, sentenced to six months in prison, and barred for three years from associating with members of his group or other racist groups.

At that point, Miller went on the lam. But then he got picked up on weapons and conspiracy to murder charges. And in a plea bargain for those crimes, he agreed to testify against other Klan leaders. Beirich said that while some supremacists saw Miller as a traitor, others excused him, blaming the government for forcing him to testify.

Plenty of other countries—Canada, France, Britain, Germany, India, South Africa—have signed international conventions banning hate speech. Not the United States. In this country, incitement becomes criminal only if there is a probability of imminent violence. If you think we have the balance wrong, you have company. As Adam Liptak expertly explains here, the former New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis wondered late in his career whether the First Amendment had been interpreted to set too high a bar on punishing “genuinely dangerous” speech. “I think we should be able to punish speech that urges terrorist violence to an audience, some of whose members are ready to act on the urging,” Lewis wrote. Courts in other countries have allowed for this, putting more weight on getting rid of hate propaganda than on promoting free speech.

That would never fly in the United States, which might seem like the wrong call after a stock character in a Jewish nightmare spewed hate for decades and then turned violent. In his case, the warning signs merited attention from law enforcement—they should quit training all their resources on Islamists and start watching people like Miller. Still, seeing hate speech, in general, through the lens of his actions is a bad idea.

March 3 2015 1:39 PMThe “Most Pleasurable Portrayal of Libertarianism“ Bonus SegmentDavid, Emily, and John discuss what Parks and Recreation got right about government.Emily Bazelon, David Plotz, and John Dickerson